Do you care? Do you care about caring? Do you care about being perceived to care? Do you go through spates of caring, then get distracted and forget what you cared about last year, last month, last week, ten seconds ago? And by care, I mean more than empathise, I mean the ache that makes you want to act – just maybe not IRL.

When I was little, I worried that if I stopped caring that the plane I was in stayed in the sky, it would fall. I believed that what really propelled metal through cloud was the positive mental energy of those inside it and I was scared that everyone else was too complacent – or suicidal – to care and that would be that. I believed that thoughts and feelings had physical power. And while I now accept that engineering is responsible for air travel, I still hold that belief, to some extent. I worry about empathy and its active cousin, care. Except these days, I worry that it’s me who does not care enough, about the right things or enough things. Or I fear my care is split between too many things and so, overladen with options of where to send it, I sometimes briefly shut it down.

Recently, two events pointed to a shift in the value of public caring. One being the outpouring of support for the plight of refugees and survival migrants, much of which came bounding offline and was transferred into action by volunteers who are still rallying to send food, goods and funds to places drastically in need. The second, and more limited, the effort to elect Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of the Labour party, after he positioned himself as someone who cares deeply about those worse off. Care attracts care, you see. To stick with the aphorisms, hope attracts hope too, for better or Nietzschean worse. We can’t predict where either will take us, but on that Saturday when Corbyn won and the people marched in solidarity with refugees, the mood, in my online circles at the least, briefly seemed a little lighter.

Shortly after, having failed to get to the march, I spent a couple of hours absorbing the news, exhausted by frustrated care, unable to do anything about 98% of this mess beyond clicking things and transferring funds. I tweeted a link to a piece about Syria and then planted my head in the paper. Bugger humanity. Well, buggered humanity, I guess. Once again. And then, I came across an Ai Weiwei interview and something he said resonated strongly: “We are the fortunate children of the past,” but also “new humans, we are created by the new technology and the new possibilities. And a new language of form, sensitivity, emotions is needed to cope with our self-consciousness and identities.”

We have mostly come to terms with the mix of identities we have to maintain. Not just the personal, public and professional that I grew up with, but now as many online variations as we can be faffed to “curate”, too. I used to worry about how to reconcile the dissonances between all of these, the tension between projections of the avatar self and the IRL self – or selves, depending on how I might be feeling – and then it finally sunk in that it was not going to change. There was no possibility of crafting a fixed identity either off screen or on, and that was that.

But the idea of a new emotional language which reflects this dissonance, how feelings split between and are acted out by these identities, could be useful (for those of us who have the privilege of being able to perform all these selves, at least). It could include a word for the cocktail of narcissism and self-doubt, poured at varying strengths, that follows many visible online actions. It could provide a definition for care by avatar, or a few. For example, one word for a perfunctory response to a guilt-making Facebook post, another for a tweet sent out to show solidarity with a cause even though offline you isn’t entirely sure whether it cares or not.

We are brought up not to show care in public. We shy away from PDA by parents as soon as we are socially conscious. After a teenage blip of wanting to be perceived to be owned by someone, we generally head further towards “do not touch me, for god’s sake” as we age. Caring can even harm your sex life. Reveal care. End game. And you can’t function actively caring all the time. Everyone knows this. So maybe it’s helpful to offload some of it online. Sounds selfish, but if you don’t shut it off, then why an £11 cocktail, not £11 to the woman on the pavement, who can get a night in a safe shelter for that?

I live in a bit of London where I can be hit up for change by the same person 3 times in a day. Eventually, I don’t want to see them. It’s not about the money, I just feel drained and can’t do another care that day. Except, I can – or my avatar can on Twitter, where everyone cares, cares about caring, cares what others are caring about. It comes through in tirades posted when one thing gets more attention than another, than someone thinks it should. I’m as guilty as anyone, posting a snarky tweet about people posting about a dead lion when well, all the death of all the humans. Yet as many commentators have rightly pointed out, we can care about more than one thing at once. But how many issues can one person and their projected online selves cope with? When I tweet an article I think matters, it seems to slightly diminish my concern over the problem. I feel like I have done something, yet simultaneously I know that I haven’t.

Yet what if – in this wilful sculpting of non-you yous – you also bleed out your IRL identity? What if caring by clicking, by shoving care out as myriad internet feels it is actually diffusing it to a point of uselessness? This constant stream of casual engagement might make us feel better, but most of the time, it’s a barely noticeable release of tiny, nascent emotions, creating content but perhaps draining the care out of us until there’s not enough left to make us act on anything. What if, eventually, our avatars do all our caring and all that is left of us is a permanently distracted, screen-glued lump of emotionless flesh?

This summer, on holiday in Sicily, I was staring at the sea. I was trying to work some things out. And eventually my mantra every time I was stuck was “just get in the fucking sea”. See, I travel alone sometimes, which is great, but leads to things like having a mantra. Anyway, it was inescapable that this was the same sea that people were drowning in, not far away. The people that I was tweeting about, signing petitions to support and sending digital money to help, hopefully. Where “get in the fucking sea and not die (hopefully)” could be a mantra.

I didn’t get in at first. It felt strange to. Then it was too hot not to and I waded in. Focused first on them. Then on me. Then on jellyfish. Finally, on about the fourth round of “get in the fucking sea” I let go and floated in it. I watched Italian kids floating, playing dead and thought about those dying. I thought about how molecules of sun cream and sweat were somewhere mixing with tears and blood. A wretched human soup: half glee, half sheer misery. And selfishly, my caring made me feel less inept, less guilty. But it also felt purer than tweeting. It was that old feeling – that caring is real. That it can lift planes and ease departed souls. So maybe, I will take some of my care back now. Back from the avatar. Back from the petitions. Hold it tightly inside, push it out at the world and then go do something about whatever it is I am caring about that day, IRL.

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Photograph by Suze Olbrich

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